HaHa... no. HR exists to try to make the shit that comes down from management taste less like shit. HR watches out for themselves and they take direction from the CEO. They're certainly not putting themselves on the line for an employee.
So write a better song, and don't sing Happy Birthday. Also, stop whining. Copyright on an existing entity does not stop you or anybody else from creating alternatives.
My argument is that it should be up to the creator to decide how long they wish to enforce copyright for. They want to enforce it for 50 years, fine. Refile something every 5-10 years and be done with it. If they can't be bothered to file, copyright expires. It should not be up to a bunch of people who are not involved in the creation of a thing to decide how long the creator should have rights to it.
The reason people attempt to file perpetual copyright is that the things being copyrighted, in most cases, still have value. If others are uncomfortable with that, they are perfectly free to create something different/better. People should stop arguing for the removal of other's rights because it's inconvenient for them.
Just because you don't want others to retain rights doesn't mean that copyright needs to be limited by anybody other than the creator. If they want to give it away, fine. It's not up to you to decide that they've gotten enough out of it and it should be yours for free now. It's perfectly in your power not to use it or pay for it, but people seem to have issues with that as well....
My daughter (4) is completely mesmerized by How It's Made on Discovery (or the Science channel). She wants to e-mail them to see how Gummi Bears are made, how pencils are made, etc. It's about the only TV that I don't feel guilty letting her watch.
Not actually, but you believe what you wish. I mentioned intrusion bars in the doors, and the fact that the door skin is useless and can be easily replaced. They add no strength in torsion or in bending since they are not rigidly attached to the B-pillar. Nothing about skinning them in fabric effects their function in any way.
Before you accuse somebody of BS, you should really have a basic familiarity with what you're talking about.
This isn't insightful, it's just wrong. Doors add no strength to the body of a car. Doors protect the occupants, but generally through the use of a large anti-intrusion beam not a skin of 22ga mild steel. Similarly, the hood and trunk lid are non-structural.
A roof can add some torsional rigidity, but you can design around that without too much trouble. Most convertibles are rattly shit-heaps because they were designed as a coupe and then the roof was removed without adequate thought given to the effect on the structure. Some cars (like the C5 Corvette) were designed as a convertible and are much more solid.
Pretty much anything you can touch on the outside of your car (roof excluded) is non-structural. It aids aerodynamics but adds weight.
I guess it depends on how you define "exceptional". I've never had a problem with Dell, but I've never dealt with Gateway or HP (outside of swiches). I call support, politely listen to them go through their checklist and get my stuff fixed. Total phone time is generally less than 45 minutes. A huge part of the problem is that the people buying the computers don't have any ability to troubleshoot them. They just get pissed off and want "mah dang computer machine fixed now!".
I'm sick of hearing people say that Americans are losing jobs due to foreigners with H1-Bs willing to work for less. That is utter nonsense. To be eligible for an H1-B visa, your employer must pay you the "prevailing wage" for that position in that geographical region. If you look up the prevailing wage database, you'll see that those wages are on the high side, and foreigners often have problems finding a job that pays enough for them to qualify for an H1-B. You're still missing one important point about how H1-Bs lower wages. They effectively lower the hourly wage of any position since they either work 75 hours a week or go back to their home country. *This* is what puts anybody who has a life outside work at a distinct disadvantage. Yes, the H1-B is salaried at the current rate, exempt employees can work as many hours as they "want" a week.
That's how H1-Bs effect employment. They don't lower the annual wages, but you have to reduce your quality of life to compete.
"Does IT make the company money? No, not a dime, they're a money sink-hole like electricity and phones."
IT is a cost, but if they are doing their jobs correctly they can also work to save the company money. Most software engineers have no clue about what technology would be best to implement their products on, they only know what got touted as the best/fastest/newest thing on./ and therefore they *must* have it (otherwise IT is "blocking" them, of course).
Generally, there's just too much ego involved from both sides. Everybody thinks their right and are more willing to play office politics to try to "prove" it than to just get the fucking job done.
Yeah, I work in IT and I've seen this countless times. It stems from the laziness of the IT staff and their unwillingness to learn anything about a new product. They continually look for ways to avoid work, and they are smart enough (sometimes) to make the system work for them sometimes.
My biggest problems come from users who want to install applications which nobody has Finance approval for. We get caught in the middle. The conversation goes something like:
U: I need Visio and Project for the project I'm working on. IT: Sure, but since we have to true-up all the licenses at the end of the year (MS Assurance crap) we just need an e-mail with an approval from Finance. U: So you won't install it? IT: We can't without Finance approval. Both you and your manager *know* that's the process. U: Thanks for nothing. IT: Ummm.. you're welcome?
Couple that with an Engineering department that won't include IT in any of their discussions about what resources they need and it's a disaster. They budget $4000 for a Quad Dual-Core processor machine with 32GB of ram and then are pissed at IT when we can't make one materialize at that price.
I am paying for bandwidth, and I expect to have it. If you don't have enough to meet the demand, ADD MORE -- it is what the stores do on hot items..they get more in of what people want. Is that a hard concept? I know you can't "make" more bandwidth, but you can start cutting the ratio of customers to available bandwidth and certainyl stop over selling.
Actually, what stores do when something is in high demand and limited supply (like bandwidth) is charge more money. You are paying very little money for download speeds of "up to X". Try pricing out Comcast cable vs a dedicated 10Mb line some day. Would you be willing to pay $2000/mo for internet access? No? Then you get a lower QoS and have to deal with some other issues.
coders vs. sysadmins
on
Hacking VIM
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· Score: 4, Informative
Coders like Emacs, sysadmins like VI. VI is small, fast, and almost always there on any system you can get to boot. Emacs is feature-packed and almost and entire development environment in itself, but it is rarely in/sbin or somewhere else that it can be useful on a crashed system.
Whether VI is good at handling 2MB files is generally irrelevant when you need to correct a typo in/etc/vfstab that's keeping one of your systems from booting. It may not be prefect, but it's better than ed.
If you could get the content of textbooks or other reference materials for $10 as opposed to the $100+ that they typically cost it would pay for itself in a typical college semester. It would also be a lot lighter, more easily searchable, and generally a vast improvement over any 500+ page reference manual. It isn't anything that an EeePC or a small tablet couldn't do, but it is an alternative which may be more attractive to some people (the EeePC screen isn't great, decent tablets are still more expensive, etc).
Battery usage is probably a non-issue. Everything uses batteries, even the beloved iPod. FWIW, the iPod is also DRM laden, but I guess it's cool enough that people are willing to overlook that.
But if you're just talking about casual reading material, I'd agree that e-book readers are going to be a hard sell.
Because the FSF is first and foremost about Freedom, and very much against any kind of DRM-like crap.
While that's true, it's totally irrelevant to the central point. The RIAA has evidence of people engaged in an illegal activity. They are taking legal action against those people (or the people they identify). They are protecting their rights, whether you believe they should have those rights or not is not relevant. You can support independent music or buy things without DRM in an effort to drive the market, but all the posturing about freedom is just hand-waving by people who want to listen to music without paying the appropriate licensing fees (which we won't classify as stealing).
The FSF should stick to promoting open source software and explicitly avoid associating themselves with file sharing and the people who engage in it.
No, it still isn't correct. What manufacturers would have done isn't relevant to the fact that the kilo prefix means 1000 of whatever follows it. I could understand the evolution of the language if kilo was no longer used anywhere else, but since in common usage there are still kilometers, kilograms, and kilopascals -- all of which mean 1000 of the following -- it's just plain incorrect.
Hard drive manufacturers are selling you exactly what they are claiming. 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes is printed right on the box and SI units agree. It's pedantic, and maybe annoying, but it is correct. As far as I'm concerned, the HD manufacturers should contemplate a suit against Microsoft for incorrectly reporting disk size.
No, the word 'Kilobyte' had established a consistent meaning of 1024 bytes
And that's where the problem started. A bunch of computer designers mis-used the kilo prefix because it was "good enough". Well, obviously it wasn't and they are the ones ultimately responsible for this mess. But they aren't a big, evil corporation that we can sue, so we'll ignore the facts for now. Right?
Common usage of something doesn't suddenly make it correct.
And it was consensus in Kansas that Pi = 3. A lot of people that habitually mis-use a term shouldn't be allowed to redefine what the term means. It just means that a lot of people are wrong.
If you didn't buy it from an authorized reseller, you're SOL. If I buy a gray market cell phone from some NYC camera shop, there's no way I'm getting support from the manufacturer on it either. If you allow price to be the only consideration, you get what you pay for.
Actually, it's not lonely at all in my world. I take responsibility for my actions and get generally positive feedback on it. Sometimes there's friction when I expect the same out of others, but more often than not there are no issues.
So, speaking from your extensive experience of being hit at a stop sign by somebody who wasn't paying attention, you feel comfortable condemning a man who undertook extensive preparations for a risky venture where, ultimately, nobody was hurt. I'd think that being as risk-adverse as you make yourself out to be you'd be afraid of falling off your high horse.
And get off the pedestrian kick too. We're not talking about doing 90mph through a residential area or a school zone. We're talking about 120+ mph on a multi-lane divided highway in an extremely capable car. I'd feel safer sharing the road with an M5 doing 130mph than a Suburban doing 80mph. Which do you think is better at making an evasive move?
I can guess how you drive too, if you want to play that game. You're far too "careful" to actually make a decision and commit to it, which causes problems for everybody behind you, but you really don't notice. Most likely, the guy rear-ended you because you almost merged, thought better of it and slammed on the brakes, causing him to hit you because he was looking for whether he could merge. The law says he was at fault, but for all intents and purposes, you caused the accident. It's fun making assumptions.
Anyway, I'm glad you think you're responsible. I think you're risk-adverse, which is not the same thing.
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HaHa... no. HR exists to try to make the shit that comes down from management taste less like shit. HR watches out for themselves and they take direction from the CEO. They're certainly not putting themselves on the line for an employee.
Except for the killing part, that's exactly how my diary would read.
So write a better song, and don't sing Happy Birthday. Also, stop whining. Copyright on an existing entity does not stop you or anybody else from creating alternatives.
My argument is that it should be up to the creator to decide how long they wish to enforce copyright for. They want to enforce it for 50 years, fine. Refile something every 5-10 years and be done with it. If they can't be bothered to file, copyright expires. It should not be up to a bunch of people who are not involved in the creation of a thing to decide how long the creator should have rights to it.
The reason people attempt to file perpetual copyright is that the things being copyrighted, in most cases, still have value. If others are uncomfortable with that, they are perfectly free to create something different/better. People should stop arguing for the removal of other's rights because it's inconvenient for them.
Just because you don't want others to retain rights doesn't mean that copyright needs to be limited by anybody other than the creator. If they want to give it away, fine. It's not up to you to decide that they've gotten enough out of it and it should be yours for free now. It's perfectly in your power not to use it or pay for it, but people seem to have issues with that as well....
cool. What device do you use to measure out exactly 33.3333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333333 cm?
My daughter (4) is completely mesmerized by How It's Made on Discovery (or the Science channel). She wants to e-mail them to see how Gummi Bears are made, how pencils are made, etc. It's about the only TV that I don't feel guilty letting her watch.
Not actually, but you believe what you wish. I mentioned intrusion bars in the doors, and the fact that the door skin is useless and can be easily replaced. They add no strength in torsion or in bending since they are not rigidly attached to the B-pillar. Nothing about skinning them in fabric effects their function in any way.
Before you accuse somebody of BS, you should really have a basic familiarity with what you're talking about.
This isn't insightful, it's just wrong. Doors add no strength to the body of a car. Doors protect the occupants, but generally through the use of a large anti-intrusion beam not a skin of 22ga mild steel. Similarly, the hood and trunk lid are non-structural.
A roof can add some torsional rigidity, but you can design around that without too much trouble. Most convertibles are rattly shit-heaps because they were designed as a coupe and then the roof was removed without adequate thought given to the effect on the structure. Some cars (like the C5 Corvette) were designed as a convertible and are much more solid.
Pretty much anything you can touch on the outside of your car (roof excluded) is non-structural. It aids aerodynamics but adds weight.
I guess it depends on how you define "exceptional". I've never had a problem with Dell, but I've never dealt with Gateway or HP (outside of swiches). I call support, politely listen to them go through their checklist and get my stuff fixed. Total phone time is generally less than 45 minutes. A huge part of the problem is that the people buying the computers don't have any ability to troubleshoot them. They just get pissed off and want "mah dang computer machine fixed now!".
That's how H1-Bs effect employment. They don't lower the annual wages, but you have to reduce your quality of life to compete.
That's because math is a tool. You don't need to learn metallurgy to use a wrench.
"Does IT make the company money? No, not a dime, they're a money sink-hole like electricity and phones."
./ and therefore they *must* have it (otherwise IT is "blocking" them, of course).
IT is a cost, but if they are doing their jobs correctly they can also work to save the company money. Most software engineers have no clue about what technology would be best to implement their products on, they only know what got touted as the best/fastest/newest thing on
Generally, there's just too much ego involved from both sides. Everybody thinks their right and are more willing to play office politics to try to "prove" it than to just get the fucking job done.
Yeah, I work in IT and I've seen this countless times. It stems from the laziness of the IT staff and their unwillingness to learn anything about a new product. They continually look for ways to avoid work, and they are smart enough (sometimes) to make the system work for them sometimes.
My biggest problems come from users who want to install applications which nobody has Finance approval for. We get caught in the middle. The conversation goes something like:
U: I need Visio and Project for the project I'm working on.
IT: Sure, but since we have to true-up all the licenses at the end of the year (MS Assurance crap) we just need an e-mail with an approval from Finance.
U: So you won't install it?
IT: We can't without Finance approval. Both you and your manager *know* that's the process.
U: Thanks for nothing.
IT: Ummm.. you're welcome?
Couple that with an Engineering department that won't include IT in any of their discussions about what resources they need and it's a disaster. They budget $4000 for a Quad Dual-Core processor machine with 32GB of ram and then are pissed at IT when we can't make one materialize at that price.
I am paying for bandwidth, and I expect to have it. If you don't have enough to meet the demand, ADD MORE -- it is what the stores do on hot items..they get more in of what people want. Is that a hard concept? I know you can't "make" more bandwidth, but you can start cutting the ratio of customers to available bandwidth and certainyl stop over selling.
Actually, what stores do when something is in high demand and limited supply (like bandwidth) is charge more money. You are paying very little money for download speeds of "up to X". Try pricing out Comcast cable vs a dedicated 10Mb line some day. Would you be willing to pay $2000/mo for internet access? No? Then you get a lower QoS and have to deal with some other issues.
Coders like Emacs, sysadmins like VI. VI is small, fast, and almost always there on any system you can get to boot. Emacs is feature-packed and almost and entire development environment in itself, but it is rarely in /sbin or somewhere else that it can be useful on a crashed system.
/etc/vfstab that's keeping one of your systems from booting. It may not be prefect, but it's better than ed.
Whether VI is good at handling 2MB files is generally irrelevant when you need to correct a typo in
Still more than $10. Point not really made...
If you could get the content of textbooks or other reference materials for $10 as opposed to the $100+ that they typically cost it would pay for itself in a typical college semester. It would also be a lot lighter, more easily searchable, and generally a vast improvement over any 500+ page reference manual. It isn't anything that an EeePC or a small tablet couldn't do, but it is an alternative which may be more attractive to some people (the EeePC screen isn't great, decent tablets are still more expensive, etc).
Battery usage is probably a non-issue. Everything uses batteries, even the beloved iPod. FWIW, the iPod is also DRM laden, but I guess it's cool enough that people are willing to overlook that.
But if you're just talking about casual reading material, I'd agree that e-book readers are going to be a hard sell.
Because the FSF is first and foremost about Freedom, and very much against any kind of DRM-like crap.
While that's true, it's totally irrelevant to the central point. The RIAA has evidence of people engaged in an illegal activity. They are taking legal action against those people (or the people they identify). They are protecting their rights, whether you believe they should have those rights or not is not relevant. You can support independent music or buy things without DRM in an effort to drive the market, but all the posturing about freedom is just hand-waving by people who want to listen to music without paying the appropriate licensing fees (which we won't classify as stealing).
The FSF should stick to promoting open source software and explicitly avoid associating themselves with file sharing and the people who engage in it.
No, it still isn't correct. What manufacturers would have done isn't relevant to the fact that the kilo prefix means 1000 of whatever follows it. I could understand the evolution of the language if kilo was no longer used anywhere else, but since in common usage there are still kilometers, kilograms, and kilopascals -- all of which mean 1000 of the following -- it's just plain incorrect.
Hard drive manufacturers are selling you exactly what they are claiming. 1GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes is printed right on the box and SI units agree. It's pedantic, and maybe annoying, but it is correct. As far as I'm concerned, the HD manufacturers should contemplate a suit against Microsoft for incorrectly reporting disk size.
And that's where the problem started. A bunch of computer designers mis-used the kilo prefix because it was "good enough". Well, obviously it wasn't and they are the ones ultimately responsible for this mess. But they aren't a big, evil corporation that we can sue, so we'll ignore the facts for now. Right?
Common usage of something doesn't suddenly make it correct.
And it was consensus in Kansas that Pi = 3. A lot of people that habitually mis-use a term shouldn't be allowed to redefine what the term means. It just means that a lot of people are wrong.
1. "You install Windows and we'll give you $100 per machine."
2. "You install Windows or we suddenly stop ignoring how much pirated Microsoft software you're running."
Probably a combination
"You install the Windows we give you on those machines and we'll continue to ignore your pirated software."
If you didn't buy it from an authorized reseller, you're SOL. If I buy a gray market cell phone from some NYC camera shop, there's no way I'm getting support from the manufacturer on it either. If you allow price to be the only consideration, you get what you pay for.
Actually, it's not lonely at all in my world. I take responsibility for my actions and get generally positive feedback on it. Sometimes there's friction when I expect the same out of others, but more often than not there are no issues.
So, speaking from your extensive experience of being hit at a stop sign by somebody who wasn't paying attention, you feel comfortable condemning a man who undertook extensive preparations for a risky venture where, ultimately, nobody was hurt. I'd think that being as risk-adverse as you make yourself out to be you'd be afraid of falling off your high horse.
And get off the pedestrian kick too. We're not talking about doing 90mph through a residential area or a school zone. We're talking about 120+ mph on a multi-lane divided highway in an extremely capable car. I'd feel safer sharing the road with an M5 doing 130mph than a Suburban doing 80mph. Which do you think is better at making an evasive move?
I can guess how you drive too, if you want to play that game. You're far too "careful" to actually make a decision and commit to it, which causes problems for everybody behind you, but you really don't notice. Most likely, the guy rear-ended you because you almost merged, thought better of it and slammed on the brakes, causing him to hit you because he was looking for whether he could merge. The law says he was at fault, but for all intents and purposes, you caused the accident. It's fun making assumptions.
Anyway, I'm glad you think you're responsible. I think you're risk-adverse, which is not the same thing.